Sexual Manifestations In Molluscs

Description

Sexual Manifestations In Molluscs

Among the Limacido? the process of love-making is slow, elaborate and exceedingly interesting. In the common garden slug it begins about midnight, of a sultry spring night. The male follows the female in a circle, resting his mouth on what may be considered the tail of the other, both all the time giving out immense quantities of mucus. When this has grown to a sufficient mass, they suspend themselves from it, by a cord of the glutinous substance, continuing to turn round each other till their bodies form a kind of cone, with the organs of generation protruding from their orifice near the mouth, and hanging down so as to touch each other. Thus twisted together, in what may be regarded as the love embrace, they remain for a considerable time, the sexual organs emitting a beautiful iridescence; when, the act being completed, they Blowly unwind themselves, and crawl away.1

Some of the HeliciaUs have special organs for awakening sexual excitement, the telum Veneris of the true snail being an example. In Helix aspersa, this dart, or feeler, is about five-Bixteenths of an inch in length, and one-eighth of an inch broad at its base. Cooke considers it an adjunct to the sexual mechanism. He found that during, and before, the act of copulation, this dart was extended and imbedded in the flesh; from which he was led to regard it as an organ whose function is to induce sexual excitement as a preparatory to coitus.1

In The Octopus

It has been shown3 that the courtship of the octopus {0, vulgaris) is conducted with the utmost propriety and delicacy, and not brutally, as had been the common supposition. The male gently stretches out his third arm on the right, caressing the female with its extremity, and finally passing it into the chamber formed by the mantle. There is a quick, spasmodic contraction of the female, but 8he does not attempt to escape; and if "the poor beetle that we tread upon, in corporal suffranee, finds a pang as great as when a giant dies," who shall say that sexual delight is not equally intense among these diminutive sensualists, and that the hour, sometimes, employed in the sexual act may not be, in some sort, a nearly eternal paradise to these tiny existences?